Since ASP.NET 4.5 in 2012, developers have had access to a pair of tools in their ASP.NET toolbox called “bundling and minification”. This feature would direct the webserver to combine together CSS or JavaScript files into one extra-large file and then apply a minification algorithm to shrink the size of the file for delivery. In ASP.NET 5 however, this feature is no longer available.

ASP.NET MVC 6 comes with a basic dependency injection container that will allow you to implement constructor and property dependency injection into your controller classes. This may be enough for smaller ASP.NET MVC 6 applications while other applications can continue to use Autofac, Ninject, StructureMap, Unity, etc.

ASP.NET MVC 6 is a ground up rewrite of the popular .NET web platform. Sweeping changes were made throughout, with even some of the most basic elements being reorganized. These changes are immediately apparent when starting a new MVC6 project, especially to developers familiar with previous versions of the framework.

Child Actions do not exist in MVC 6. Instead, we are encouraged to use the new View Component feature to support this use case. Conceptually, view components are a lot like child actions but they are a lighter weight and no longer involve the lifecycle and pipeline related to a controller.

ASP.NET Core opens the doors to new opportunities for ASP.NET developers through integration points in Bower, NPM, and Gulp. One perk of using common web development tools is that frameworks like Foundation can be installed directly from the vendor whereas before developers needed to rely on NuGet packages.

ASP.NET Core 1.0 is a complete rewrite of ASP.NET, and one of the main goals for this new framework is a more modular design. That is, apps should be able to leverage only those parts of the framework they need, with the framework providing dependencies as they’re requested.